Explorations in theology and animal studies

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Karl Rahner

My free time is typically severely limited. I usually have one day a week that is not entirely filled with obligations well in advance, and that is usually the day in which I do most of my reading, and all of my writing. This past weekend however, I spent a total of 20 hours painting the set of a play being put on by my good friend’s drama students, so I had zero time to read or write anything for the blog. I did, however, come across some great talks given at Santa Clara University last month.

The first is a talk by professor Celia Deane-Drummond, on “The Wisdom of the Liminal: Re-Imaging the Image of God in an Evolutionary Multispecies Context”, and the second, by Oliver Putz, is entitled “What Good is God to Animals?: Human Uniqueness in Theology and Science.” Both talks consider different aspects of the supposed exceptionalism of human beings in a way that incorporates insights from both the theological tradition and the sciences, particularly those of evolutionary biology and cognitive ethology. Deane-Drummond’s talk probes the question of the image of God, going beyond substantivist, functionalist and even relational definitions to propose a novel “performative” conception of the imago Dei: She draws on the theodramatic approach of Hans Urs Von Balthasar as well as insights from anthropology into the co-evolution of humans and other animals in cooperative community “niches”, to suggest that the image of God in human beings can best be understood in terms of the unique performance of humanity in relation to God in a way that is responsive to the active presence of other creatures.

Oliver Putz turns to consider the possibility of religious, or at least proto-religious, experience in some nonhuman animals. Citing Jane Goodall’s observation that chimpanzees do indeed seem to exhibit something like awe at the sight of large bodies of water in the wild, he asks, “could it be that some animals are actually aware of the ineffable?” He shows that certain experiments in comparative psychology and cognitive ethology have demonstrated self-consciousness in certain non-human animals like primates, elephants, dolphins and magpies (Deane-Drummond mentions in the Q&A that similar experiments with dogs showed positive results only when scent was used in lieu of a visual marker for self-identification), and that there is ample evidence that these creatures exist in “intersubjective” relations with one another. Integrating these scientific insights with Karl Rahner’s theology of experience, Putz argues that insofar as these non-human animals possess self-consciousness, they possess that which Rahner argued is the basis for the experience of the transcendent in humans, namely, a pre-reflexive capacity to reach beyond the objects of sense experience to the underlying being itself.

Be sure to watch these fascinating discussions in your free time, along with the great Q&A below. Enjoy!